Partnerships

Our long-standing partnership with BAS is based on observational and theoretical work on ice-ocean interactions. Examples include the CryoSat mission, Ice2Sea, and the iSTARconsortia. We also lead a number of ESA awards involving BAS, including the ESA-STSE Arctic Peninsula Mass Balanceproject and Antarctic CCI, as well as the international IMBIEconsortium, the UK Sea Ice Group, and the Joint Sea Ice Modelling Programme which coordinates UKESM development for sea ice across the MO, CPOM, NOC, and BAS.

Collaborations with NOC also involve observational and theoretical work on ice-ocean interactions. Examples include the the GENIE, ASBO, and TEA-COSI consortia, as well as iSTAR. We also chair the Joint Sea Ice Modelling Programme as above.

Our land ice and sea ice datasets continue to be delivered to NCEO as a continuation of the partnership we have built to widen the impact of our science. For NCEO, this focuses on the latest CryoSat datasets for use in data assimilation.

Andy Shepherd is the Principal Scientific Advisor to the CryoSat-2 mission, dedicated to measuring polar sea ice thickness and the mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. CPOM has also led the development of the CryoSat Performance Monitoring & QA Service. CPOM is also closely involved with other ESA missions relevant to the polar regions, including Sentinel-1, Sentinel-3 and the GRACE follow-on gravimeters, for example via the Sentinel-3 Mission Performance Centre and Validation Team.

Our long-standing partnership with the MO includes the use of our satellite observations to evaluate and develop climate models. This is now formalised through the Joint Sea Ice Modelling Programme(JSIMP), co-chaired by Danny Feltham. Our data are, for example, used to test global climate model predictions, in particular via the continued integration of GLIMMER into the UK Earth System Model (UKESM), and the use of near real-time sea ice measurements from CryoSat to test model assumptions and performance. Our joint goals are now to integrate the BISICLES model into the UKESM to allow process-based projections of future sea level rise; and to assimilate measurements of sea ice into daily, seasonal and decadal weather predictions.